FROM INFAMY TO HOPE

A young woman sets out to find her infant daughter in 17th-century Boston.

From the outset, Lewis’ novel immerses readers in a pathologically moralistic Puritan society. After being brutally raped, the female protagonist, Rachel, attracts opprobrium and censure from the locals. She is forced—like Hester Prynne with her A—to wear a Won her breast, for Whore. Meanwhile the smirking lout who raped her, Henry Watkins, is simply sent back to his family in Salem, a clue as to how women were treated in this misogynistic time and place. But Rachel does have powerful help in the person of Anne Hutchinson, who takes her in. The Hutchinsons are fabulously wealthy, and Anne is the archenemy of power-obsessed Governor John Winthrop, who gets wind of the Bible sessions she leads in order to further her radical interpretation of Holy Writ. Rachel, though living with the Hutchinsons, is also a servant in the Winthrop household, and her master encourages her to report on her benefactress’ teachings. For devious reasons, Winthrop gins up a war against the Pequot tribe to the west, where Rachel has reason to believe she can find her daughter, who was taken away by her drunken father. So, she disguises herself as a teenage boy and volunteers. The Pequot War (1636–38) is a disgraceful and bloody expedition, but the Puritans win. Does Rachel find her infant daughter? Well, that’s spoiler territory, but let’s just say that the book’s ending is bittersweet.

Lewis has a raft of publications, fiction and nonfiction, under his belt, and the writing more than shows that. And Rachel, who is also the narrator, is a wonderful creation, smart and spunky and intuitive. As she sizes up of one of her inquisitors, “He tries to soften his voice to tell he is on my side, but the effect is hideous, as though he was a filthy toad trying to talk like a man.” She sees through the hypocrisy and venality of the powers that be (the Pequot War was widely considered a land grab). Anne Hutchinson was a real historical character, hated and feared by the establishment because she believed in the Covenant of Grace, as opposed to Winthrop and his crew, who backed the Covenant of Works. Winthrop managed to get Hutchinson, his nemesis, expelled from the colony. She resettled in Roger Williams’ Providence Plantations, a place of sanctuary in the New England sea of madness. Lewis, a retired academic who has a doctorate in the literature of that period, truly makes 17th-century New England come alive. He includes an anecdote—fictional, one hopes, but with more than the ring of historical truth—about a woman who tries to kill her bastard infant. Although this act will strike readers as horrendous and unconscionable, at least this poor woman’s tormented anxiety about her fate in the afterlife has been settled: She knows for certain that she’s damned. Rachel is part of this world, but she seems a harbinger of a newer, more humane society, and that is the saving—not the predestined—grace.

A historically evocative period piece with a strong, inspiring hero who will resonate with a wide swath of readers.